Comment Remember HSA 1.0 ? (Score 2) 46
AMD bought ATI 20 years ago, back in 2006, to be the first company (or was it VIA first?) to have an integrated CPU-GPU offering.
They kept on talking about HSA 1.0 which would make it possible to pass pointers between the CPU and the GPU without the need to copy the actual data between the main memory and the graphics memory.
I cannot find the original reference, but I still found these:
https://hothardware.com/news/h...
https://forums.anandtech.com/t...
What happened after that? AMD stopped publishing any drivers that would allow running OpenCL on their APUs.
They actively blocked programmers from accessing the part that provides 99% of the processing power, just as Nvidia was taking off.
Obviously everyone working on AI flocked to CUDA and now that platform is entrenched.
Look at the HSA Foundation now, their most recent "news" are from 2020:
https://hsafoundation.com/
I wonder where we would be now if developers had the possibility to run OpenCL on the APUs of their laptops.